Mar. 31, 2014
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Water surrounds mailboxes in Oso. / David Ryder, Getty Images

by Elizabeth Weise, USATODAY

by Elizabeth Weise, USATODAY

The horrific Oso landslide on March 22 destroyed lives, homes, a rustic street and the kind of area that makes western Washington so amazing to live in.

The love of wild, unsettled land calls to folks who don't like to be told what to do.

So much so that back in 1995, a group of them petitioned to secede from Snohomish County. One reason they gave was that county and state environmental and land-use policies were oppressive.

Thomas Satterlee, 65, was one of the leaders of the secession movement. He died in the Oso slide with his wife, Marcy.

I don't know about the oppressive part, but I understand the draw of living even where you know bad things might happen.

I grew up in Seattle. It rains. Everything is green. There are amazing hills and mountains. I miss it every day, the sense that the Earth is still finding its final form and is alive with possibility.

But that uneven topography and flow of water that so delight the eye come at a price.

"Western Washington is very unstable geologically," says Dave Ammons, communication director for Washington's secretary of State. "There are risks to be taken in living in some of the most beautiful places on Earth, along riverbanks, unstable cliffs, mountaintop vistas."

My grandfather was a mountain climber, drawn since childhood to those mountaintops. He died falling from one.

We knew the risks. Every couple of years, something near our house would slump down. Sometimes the edge of the bank in our backyard, sometimes a cliff would take out a house or two.

In the end, gravity wins. One day, Washington will end up looking like Kansas.

"It's all coming down eventually," says Kate Allstadt, a geologist at the University of Washington-Seattle. "That's just the way things go here. We can do things to speed it up or slow it down - or get out of the way."

It's too beautiful for many of us who live there, or come from there, to want to get out of the way.

That same love for the wild, unsettled land has another expression - a desire to be left alone. In the week I spent covering the disaster, I never once heard anyone from Oso say the government should have kept them from moving in.

People in Snohomish take their responsibility to protect themselves seriously. Anyone who lives near snowmelt rivers knows it's the floods that get you.

Most of the people I interviewed had done a lot of due diligence on that front. The bend in the north fork of the Stillaguamish that defined their paradise of Steelhead Drive was a known hazard. They knew when it flooded and how high it had gone in the past.

How to reconcile the desire to live in such a wild and alive place, and stay safe? The week after the slide was too soon to ask. Come January, when the state Legislature comes back into session, the issue will come up.

Ammons says there will be some legislative suggestions for helping people pay attention to what it means to live in a geologically unstable area. "The body of knowledge is there," he says. "The question is how much we are willing to limit our choices."

Knowing the allure of the wildness, it's hard to think it will be very much.